paths

When trying to find a photo in a garden, a key concept is to look for leading lines. These are lines you, the photographer, find in a garden that can lead the viewer’s eye into the photo. These lines can frame your composition and lead to focal points as well, but fundamentally they must start [...]

Native plant gardens tend to be hard to photograph. Often the gardeners care more about the plants and habitat than the aesthetics. This is perfectly OK - unless you are trying to photograph them. We need better photographs of native plant gardens to encourage those gardeners who DO care about aesthetics, who want to do [...]

Most gardens of any size are designed with wending in mind. Don't you just love that Old English word "wending" ? So casual, carefree, and contemplative by inference. Even formal entries can invite wending. The entry to this garden was designed by my friend, the landscape architect Robyn Sherrill, who fortunately for me does not [...]

Garden photographers just love focal points designed into gardens. In great gardens though, they present dilemmas. What is the best angle ? Let's take a stroll around one of the rooms in Gary Ratway's own garden: Gary is one of those exceedingly rare landscape architects who knows more than 25 plants. Not only does he [...]

When we decided to start the Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop six weeks ago, we figured it would mostly be a fun excuse to ramble on here at GGW about some of our favorite topics. Little did we expect that so many of you would find it of interest and want to “play” too! The various [...]